Transcript for Episode 32: The Golden Girls Have a Gay, Live-In Cook

This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Golden Girls episode “The Engagement.” If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here.The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.

Rose:  What if she marries him? What will happen to us? This house is hers.

Dorothy:  Well, then we'll move.

Rose:  We can't afford to buy a house. What do we have for collateral? A gay cook?

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  Oh, come on, Rose. Nobody is getting married. Now let's go talk to Blanche.

Rose:  Dorothy, we'll become bag ladies!

[audience laughs]

["Thank You for Being a Friend" performed by Cindy Fee plays]

Drew:  Hello, and welcome to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast where we talk about the LGBT-focused episodes of classic sitcoms, which is to say the very special episodes that also happen to be very queer episodes. I'm Drew Mackie.

Glen:  I'm Glen Lakin. 

Drew:  And today we are talking about Golden Girls— 

Glen:  What?

Drew:  —which is not what we said we were going to talk about. We said we were going to talk about a cartoon as the first installment of our off-season episodes. 

Drew:  So you're a liar?

Drew:  Well, we're still going to do that one next, I think, but we're doing this episode of Golden Girls because Coco died, and it's sad. 

Glen:  Yes. Well, you should probably explain that further—the gorilla died a long time ago.

Drew:  We're doing this episode because Charles Levin, the actor who played Coco in the original episode of Golden Girls—he's the gay, live-in cook—who if you just watched the first episodes you'd be led to believe that he was going to be a big part of the show. He did not end up becoming a big part of the show. His death was kind of sad, and I feel bad because I had a recurring joke where I always used to say that Coco was lost at sea. I feel bad about that now because— 

Glen:  That's not how he died though. 

Drew:  No. He was lost in a rural area, and it just kind of—I realize that every person I've ever made fun of will eventually die. However, it made me sad.

Glen:  And people say I'm the mean one. You're just over here wishing people dead.

Drew:  I didn't wish that he died. I wished that his character had been given a legitimate out on the show, and since they live in Miami they could just be like, "Oh, he was lost—" I don't know.

Glen:  Why does he have to be out, Drew? Because he's gay? 

Drew:  Yeah. He is. He died in rural Oregon. He'd been missing for a week. They found his car. They found his dog dead in the car, which is extra sad.  

Glen:  You don't need to put that part in? It's sad.  

Drew:  It is. It really is sad.

Glen:  I mean the human's sad too.

Drew:  I mean, I'm going to leave it in there.

Glen:  I know. 

Drew:  Well, it's sad because it looks like it—they're investigating suicide and homicide. It doesn't look like it was probably either of those. It might have just been an accident. And then, no one knew that his dog was trapped in the car, which is just extra sad. He would not have wanted his dog to die. He'd wish he didn't die. Yes. I'm saying, it's really sad. 

Glen:  Welcome to the episode. 

Drew:  [laughs] Do you remember Coco? 

Glen:  No. I remember this episode vividly except for the Coco part. It's almost like I mind-wiped him. 

Drew:  Like Mandela effect, where Coco never existed in your universe?  

Glen:  Yeah. He's the Berenstain bear of Golden Girls. It's strange. This whole episode's kind of strange in that it's not strange at all. It's strange for a pilot. The plot of the episode is that Blanche is going to marry someone she just met, and so the other girls are worried that they're going to have to move out. And it's a weird in for a series, and we do get a flashback episode later in the show that shows them all meeting and it's like, "Why is that not an episode?" We just sort of dive right in, but then also the plot is about this situation that we're just getting comfortable with already being possibly thrown into flux. 

Drew:  I guess that is weird. In medias res is not a bad way to start a story, but I think it ties up well at the end when you're like, "Oh, this is what the show is about. We get it now." They spell it out very clearly what the dynamic between these three women is supposed to be.

Glen:  They are all very lived-in characters by the time we meet them. They are who they are. 

Drew:  They're all almost exactly who they are supposed to be. They're all almost there, but there's little bits missing with each of them.

Glen:  There's little bits missing. The St. Olaf thing isn't there.

Drew:  Oh, yeah. That's true. I didn't even think about that. That is gone. 

Glen:  But yeah, both the dialogue and the performances are who those characters are going to be. I'd say Blanche grows a bit more into who she's going to be later on.

Drew:  There's a big difference with Blanche. I can't wait to talk about it when we get to that part. But there's something that I overlooked until I read about it, and I was like, "Oh, my god. You're right." 

Glen:  But we're talking about this episode because of the gay cook, Coco.

Drew:  Right. Coco—whose last name is Davis. Coco Davis, that's the character's full name. Apparently it was in the script at some point as Coco Davis. I don't know if that's the last name I expected that character to have. I don't know what ethnicity he was supposed to be, but he could have been many ethnicities and they gave him the last name Davis. Hmm. I don't know. Coco Davis is in only the pilot to Golden Girls, played by Charles Levin, who previously had small roles in Annie Hall and Manhattan. He's in that one Christmas episode of Family Ties where they have flashbacks to all of the kids being born. He plays the doctor. 

Glen:  Oh.

Drew:  Oh, and then he's also in the Tales from the Crypt where he's married to Colleen Camp and they get a genie, and the genie fucks with their life. It's called "Djinn, No Chaser," which I think is a very good name for a genie episode. And then he was recurring on Alice, and then he played a recurring gay character on Hill Street Blues for six episodes named Eddie Gregg.

Eddie:  Can't you change that to 'lascivious carriage'? It's a tonier kind of bust.

You were soliciting, pig breath.

Eddie:  I've never tricked for anyone I wouldn't have done gratis.

Drew:  He's kind of hunky in this, playing a flamboyantly gay role. It's a weird line to tread, and he does it very nicely. He got a lot of good notes for that at NBC, and that's the reason he eventually got this role. To give a little bit of context, I'm going to do a very quick history of the Golden Girls.

Glen:  What? Never heard of it.

Drew:  Golden Girls debuted in fall of 1985. It was one of the most talked about shows. Everyone was very excited about it because it was bringing together these three legendary comedic actresses, and everyone had high expectations for how this series was going to do. All those expectations were appropriate because it did really well, and everyone loved it, basically, from day one. It began as sort of a parody thing that I don't think ever actually aired on TV. It might have just been something that NBC did for a promotional event: making fun of the previous year's hit show which was Miami Vice. They thought it would be funny to do something about retirees in Florida and call it Miami Nice, and it starred Doris Roberts and Selma Diamond—the bailiff from Night Court. Wherever this screened, people thought it was funny. You can't find it anywhere online, which I think is a tragic loss. Someone should dig that up somewhere. It's got to be in someone's attic somewhere in Los Angeles. Warren Littlefield was the exec at NBC who decided "Actually, that's a really good idea. We should do a show about old women living in Miami." Warren Littlefield, by the way—his list of accomplishments includes Cheers, The Phylicia Rashad Show, Seinfeld, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Wings, Blossom, Law and Order, Mad About You, Sisters, Frasier, Friends, ER, Homicide Life on the Street, Caroline in the City, News Radio, Third Rock from the Sun, Suddenly Susan, Just Shoot Me, and Will and Grace. 

Glen:  Wow, Caroline in the City!

Drew:  [laughs] Suddenly Susan, also. I think Suddenly Susan's the bigger outlier in that. But it's weird looking at all the shows he ushered into existence during his time at NBC and be like, "Wow! You are responsible for most of what I remember about my childhood. Well done, sir." The idea went to Susan Harris who had previously created Soap and Benson, and she was really stoked to write about—she wanted to represent groups of people you normally didn't see on TV. Estelle Getty was the first one cast because—

Glen:  Really?

Drew:  —someone had seen her in Torch Song Trilogy on Broadway, and she'd just come out to Los Angeles to try her hand at that side of the acting world. She was the first one picked, then Betty White and Rue McClanahan almost simultaneously because Mama's Family had just been canceled. They were both on that the previous season, so they were both suddenly freed up. And they joined, but only on the condition [that] everyone probably everyone knows at this point—they flopped roles. And then Bea Arthur was the last to join. She didn't want to do it because she didn't want it to be Maude and Vivian meet Sue Ann from Mary Tyler Moore, but with Rue McClanahan playing the sexy one and Betty White playing the naive one, that was different enough where she was like, "Okay. I'll do it." So everyone's basically in place except for Coco. For the history of Coco, I looked it up in this book called Golden Girls Forever by Jim Colucci. It came out kind of the same time my article—the roundtable for Golden Girls stuff came out.

Glen:  I remember when you got the book, and you threw it against the wall and then started screaming.

Drew:  It's really well done. If I ever wrote a book about Golden Girls  it would be different. I think both could exist, but he did a really good job with his, and he has a very detailed history. NBC was the one who wanted a gay character on the show. That was their note to Susan Harris: "Could you work an openly gay character into the show?" And it was extra good that she did it because she was the one who created Billy Crystal's character on Soap. Not the first gay character on a sitcom. That seems to be—Vincent Schiavelli, the character actor, played one on a one-season CBS show called The Corner Bar. She named Coco after her dog.

Glen:  Uhhhh.

Drew:  Yeah. I do not like that he is named Coco. There is no reason for that character to be named Coco. It seems—

Glen:  It seems like a laugh line. 

Drew:  Yeah. Or it seems to be playing to what certain people's ideas of what a gay man would be like, which the character isn't—based on what we see about him, really.

Glen:  Yes and no. Half and half. 

Drew:  They auditioned a bunch of people including Jeffrey Jones from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and other unpleasantness, and also Paul Provenza who played Carol's husband on that one season of Empty Nest when she gets married.

Glen:  Oh, yeah.

Drew:  Also the guy who directed The Aristocrats—the documentary about that joke.

Glen:  Huh.

Drew:  Weird. And then, no one knew who could do this role. It was also written [that] Coco was supposed to be a drag queen—not in drag all the time, but someone who lived in the house as a man [whose] night job was going out and performing in drag, which I think would have been a really cool thing to have on the show. Not something we ever saw. And then NBC president Brandon Tartikoff was the one who suggested Charles Levin based on Hill Street Blues. But when he went in for the role, Jay Sandrich who directed the episode told him, "I don't want you coming out here and doing a lisp or mincing around. Just be a regular guy who is gay," and the audition tanked. No one laughed. Like, no one laughed, and he was like, "Fuck. That was not how it was supposed to go." And then someone who worked at NBC was like, "Yeah. We don't know what you were doing in your audition. Can you come back and just do the Hill Street Blues character?" So he was like, "Okay." And he got the role.

Glen:  It's not strange if you listen to any of our friends who are actors talk about their auditions.

Drew:  Like being given paradoxical and counterintuitive advice?

Glen:  And always having to fall back on the stereotype. Not always, but at some point, one of the takes is going to be, "Just do it more like the stereotype," and that's when they get the huge laughs.

Drew:  Someone was just talking—there's a word for, like, just embracing all the parts of the stereotype that you hate, but you also need a paycheck. So they taped the episode, and Charles Levin actually says that he and Estelle were very nervous because Betty White, Rue McClanahan, uh—[laughs]. Bea Arthur is her name. I forgot her name for a second.

Glen:  I will slap you across the table. 

Drew:  Her ghost will come in here and roundhouse kick me in the face is what's going to happen. They're legends. They'd all been on at least one successful show each if not two, and everyone was very nervous about—they were very nervous about competing with them. They both did really well, though. Estelle was the most nervous, and the audience was just loving her lines. But apparently, according to most accounts, they were also loving Coco. He had a lot of lines that were—

Glen:  Cut?

Drew:  Cut. 

Glen:  Because he's like a ghost in this episode. He's barely there.

Drew:  As we go through, there's a few points where you can tell that he was supposed to do something here, and it was just cut because the initial pilot ran twenty-eight minutes. So they cut five minutes and it was all Coco, which sucks. However, when Jeffrey Jones auditioned for the part of Coco, he's like, "Yeah. I don't really know what this guy's doing here because it seems like it's a show about the women. I don't really understand why there needs to be a man on the show." So he might have talked NBC out of having that role be on the show, but they did tape the first episode with both Sophia and Coco. At this point, Sophia—Shady Pines had not burned down.

Glen:  Oh.

Drew:  No. Shady Pines had not burned down. She was just going to be a recurring character on the show who'd pop in sometimes, and Coco was going to be the house boy. When they realized how successful Sophia was they were like, "I think it should be a show about four women. We should make her part of the show." So they went back and—what are pickups? 

Glen:  That is when you're not recording the whole thing; you're just going back. So with a four-camera sitcom, it's not like they're doing the scenes whole. It's just picking up moments. 

Drew:  Okay. So the version that we saw when we watched it was with pickups that wrote Coco further out of the show and gave some of his lines to Sophia, I think. 

Glen:  And also that Shady Pines burned down.

Drew:  Yeah. I don't believe that was initially the news she was coming in with when she shows up in that scene. I don't know if she was even in that scene because her presence on this episode is very strange as well. Her and Coco never show up in the same scene. They're never on screen at the same time. They're almost like they're mutually exclusive, like, whenever one is there the other isn't there—or the one is just out of the room or something.

Glen:  Right. She talks about him a lot.

Drew:  She calls him "the fancy man," and they go on a date at the end, so they weren't completely divorcing him from the reality. It's just a very—I would love to read the original script and be like, "Oh, that's what was supposed to happen." So something happened after the fact. He was bummed. NBC was bummed because they didn't want to get rid of their gay character. They thought it'd be progressive to have an openly gay character on this show that they thought was going to be a hit and something that would be viewed by most Americans—womp womp. It's worth pointing out that the three leads were the known quantities, and then this old lady who had a mouth on her and this crazy gay guy who talked back were wild cards that they had no idea if either of them would be successful with the audience, but because people felt so comfortable with the leads, the audience—both tapings of the pilot, they liked both of them and it just worked. It wasn't ever Charles Levin's fault that he got wrote out of the show, really. You just can't really compete with a feisty old lady though. 

Glen:  No, you can't.

Interrupting Drew:  Hi. This is Drew, interrupting myself to reiterate that maybe barring one point or so, all the information about Coco behind the scenes on the Golden Girls pilot comes from the book Golden Girls Forever by Jim Colucci. If you enjoy the show, you will enjoy this book. I can't think of a better document celebrating the show in fine details and broad strokes. I feel dumb now for not having used it in our previous Golden Girls episodes because literally every episode of Golden Girls gets detailed. As testament to how good this book is, here is a trivia point for each of the three previous Golden Girls we did—all stuff I didn't know until I read the book. (1) In "Isn't it Romantic" a.k.a. "Dorothy's Friend is a Lesbian," Blanche famously confuses the word "Lebanese" for "lesbian," saying, "Isn't Danny Thomas one?" Danny Thomas was a famous Lebanese American entertainer, and although I mention him and his daughter Marlo Thomas, I did not realize that Tony Thomas—who is one of the producers on Golden Girls and whose name you see in the credits of every episode—is Danny Thomas's son and Marlo's sister. Also, Jeffrey Duteil, who wrote this episode, told Colucci that he did so specifically as a response to Coco disappearing and therefore depriving the show of a queer presence. Regarding "Scared Straight," which we called "Blanche's Brother is a Homo," there's a nice bit comparing that episode's structure to the one gay Mary Tyler Moore episode, which we also covered and which we called "Mary and Rhoda Meet a Homo." In fact, the writer for this Golden Girls episode, Christopher Lloyd, is the son of David Lloyd who wrote for Mary Tyler Moore and who is said to recall the gay actor playing the brother on Mary Tyler Moore being backstage feeling uncomfortable at how the audience would receive him. The actor's boyfriend was also backstage and comforted him with the following—quote, "They've been laughing at fags since Aristophanes. You're going to kill them," end quote. And finally there's "Sister of the Bride," which we called "Blanche's Homo Brother Wants to Get Gay Married" Jamie Wooten who wrote the episode with Mark Cherry recalls how the episode go them some really vile hate mail, but he counterbalances that recollection with this, which I will quote verbatim: "To put it in perspective, we got far more letters about Bea's hair," that's B-E-A-apostrophe-S hair, "than any other topic, episode, or controversy ever. In general they hated it, and they would give us very specific ways how to fix it, which I thought was kind of hilarious and touching that they really cared. I don't think they ever let Bea know." Again the book is called Golden Girls Forever by Jim Colucci. I'm putting a link where you can buy it in the show notes as well as a page where you can access all of our previous Golden Girls episodes. Also, I promise this episode will not be me just talking forever. 

Drew:  The episode is titled "The Engagement." It originally aired September 14, 1985. I was three and a half. I don't remember what I was doing when it aired. The show drew 21.5 million viewers that week.

Glen:  I thought you were about to say villains. I was like—it created some, I'm sure.

Drew:  [laughs] It was the most watched show that week, which was awesome because they didn't know it was going to be a hit. They were taking a risk making a show about three old ladies, and people loved it right from the start, and it was the highest premier NBC had gotten since Chico and the Man in 1974. It aired on a block that also included new episodes of Gimme a Break!, Facts of Life, and 227 which I would watch that today.

Glen:  Yeah. I would time travel back to that two-hour block of TV. 

Drew:  That's actually all the background I have. If you're ready, Glen, we can go through what I think might be historically the only Coco-centric study of the pilot to Golden Girls. 

Glen:  I'm sure others exist.

Drew:  I'm going to say we're the only one ever.

Glen:  And it's not really Coco centric. He's there.

Drew:  We're going to give him as much attention as we possibly can.

Glen:  Through the Coco lens 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, the Coco lens. Okay. Scene One. Coco's the second character we see. Dorothy comes in from a bad day at work.

Glen:  Already a teacher. That's already part of her character.

Drew:  And I think she's grumpier. She's just complaint after complaint, nothing's okay with her, and maybe someone was like, "Hey, can we lighten her up a little bit?"

Glen:  My first note was "Okay. Yikes, Dorothy." 

Drew:  [laughs]

Glen:  She comes in, and she's like, "I had to kick students out of class."

Dorothy:  I taught a class today—the finest school in Dade County. Two girls had shaved heads, and three boys had green hair.

[audience laughs]

Coco:  They're expressing themselves.

Dorothy:  Yeah. Well, I expressed myself. I told them they had to leave. They were too ugly to look at.

[audience laughs] 

Dorothy:  Now the parents are mad. A father came in, in a three-piece suit, and defended Tiffany, a bald girl with a nose ring. 

[audience laughs] 

Dorothy:  What's that?

Coco:  Enchiladas rancheros.

Dorothy:  Why don't you just shoot me? 

Glen:  Yeah. You can't do that. 

Drew:  I feel like Dorothy, even just a few episodes later would not be such a—would not have such a stick up her ass and would be okay. Like, they came to school, Dorothy. They obviously want to learn. She wouldn’t normally care so much that they looked weird—enough that she'd kick them out of the class. So they were still figuring out who that was. But she comes into the kitchen. Coco is making enchiladas rancheros, and Dorothy's response was like, "Just kill me"? or "Just shoot me"?

Glen:  Because old people can't have spicy things.

Drew:  Okay. I was—I guess that's a gastrointestinal stress joke.

Glen:  She later also jokes about being served hot food on a 100-degree day. I think some of the jokes in this episode lean into "Hey we're old," especially when talking about the dating pool in Miami. There's a lot of old man jokes. 

Drew:  Right. Yeah. They got past that a lot too, because they all eventually find people to date. Rose walks in, and she's not quite as dumb as she would be.

Rose:  What a day. One sad person after another.

Dorothy:  Rose, you work at grief counseling. What do you expect, comedians?

[audience laughs]

Rose:  Well, it'd be a change of pace. 

[audience laughs]

Glen:  Which I don't know how long she has that job. 

Drew:  I think at least for the first season. By the third season, she's working for the public TV station where she's an associate producer. I remember that specifically because that is the job I had a few years ago, and I was like, "Great. I have the same job that Rose Nylund had at 65. Awesome."

Dorothy:  You know I had the shock of my life today. I was in the teacher's lounge talking to a group of girls in their 20s. Oh, they were so pretty. At that age you don't even have to be pretty and you're pretty. Anyway, we were laughing and giggling and having a great time, and I completely forgot that I was older. You know, I just felt like one of the girls, and we had a wonderful time—and then I got into my car and caught a glimpse of myself, and I almost had a heart attack. This old woman was in the mirror. I didn't even recognize her. 

Rose:  Who was it? 

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  It was me! 

Rose:  Oh.

Drew:  That is when Rose feels the purist, like, they've understood who Rose is because she—[laughter]. "Who is it?" And they have a few moments like that, too. She's never quite as stupid as she is in her stupidest moment, but you see flashes of she's just not getting it. There's actually one with Blanche a few minutes later that's kind of similar. Then—

Glen:  Well, we should go back. This is a Coco episode. We should talk about your first impressions of Coco. My first impression was shocked that they—I guess I didn't know going in that he was going to be an openly gay man.

Drew:  I don't feel like most people watching the show for the first time would necessarily be clear until Rose says it a few scenes later.

Glen:  But he is performatively homosexual by 1980s standards—

Drew:  He's kind of like a less-Latin-seeming version of Hank Azaria from The Birdcage.

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  But in my head he was even more so because I inflated his gayness in my head to make it off the charts, so I'm like, "Oh. He is kind of—" He's not wearing a kimono. He's wearing a Hawaiian shirt or something—a brightly colored shirt.

Glen:  Yeah. That's the thing. He dances the line between—quote/unquote—obviously gay and just flamboyant, approaching-middle-age single man. 

Drew:  Well, it's interesting to think about. If they had made him exceptionally flamboyant it would have been a weird thing where this man is subservient to women, and if he's very effeminate that would be a weird vibe. So I wonder if that was a calculated thing, like, "You can't be a ten. You can't be a one. You have to be four to six. Pick a range."

Glen:  Yeah. He actually felt like a real character. I don't want to say by pointing out that his mannerisms that he was openly gay or performing gay; he read as someone who was gay but also real.

Drew:  I think that's the Hillstreet Blues talking because I went back and watched the clip. And yeah, he plays a hustler who has been arrested, and he gets to know the guy who's taking down his information to enter in his arrest record, and he's charming and human. He just is not hiding the fact that he is gay. 

Glen:  Right.

Drew:  For 1985, that's kind of a big deal.

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  I can't recall seeing a character quite like that at any other point—[muffled banging]. There's hammering outside because they're building a house or something. I don't know what's going on. Blanche is coming out of this entire scene getting ready for a date with Harry, who the girls haven't met but Blanche seems very keen on, and even Coco seems to know who he is.

Blanche:  Lord, I'd love to get a face lift by 8:00. 

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  Blanche, who is Harry? 

Blanche:  Oh, girls. He's just wonderful. He's very gallant. He's a perfect gentleman. He's a great dancer, and he doesn't make noises when he chews. 

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  Chewing—that's way up there on my list.

[audience laughs]

Glen:  And I was just like, "Harry? Can this show not come up with more names?"

Drew:  Is there another Harry other than Harry Weston?

Glen:  No, but two is—

Drew:  Do you notice what's different about Blanche? There's something very—and I didn't notice until it was pointed out to me, but it's completely true. There's something—

Glen:  Gills.

Drew:  She has gills, yes. She was a mer-person in the original version of this. No! She doesn't have her accent. So Rue McClanahan—

Glen:  That's what I thought. I thought there was a little bit of it.

Drew:  Rue McClanahan is from Oklahoma, and what you're hearing in this episode is Rue's natural Oklahoma accent. She did a Blanche DuBois, big, broad, Southern accent, and that same director who told Coco to play it straight basically was like, "Don't do that." And she was like, "Okay," and then the second episode, it's there. She's like, "No. I'm going to do it." She does it in every other episode.

Glen:  Because she is—like, Dorothy calls her a "Southern Baptist," and the southern drama of her character is there from the first episode; just the accent is not.

Drew:  So that was the difference. But then there's the joke where Rose doesn't understand Dorothy's story about the old woman in the mirror. And then a few minutes later there's a very similar story, but this is after Dorothy has complained about the shallow dating pool in Miami.

Glen:  All the single men under 80 are cocaine smugglers.

Drew:  Which I guess is a very Miami Vice way to look at the world. And then Blanche is listing off all of Harry's virtues, including that he doesn't check his pulse.

Blanche:  He doesn't talk loud at the movies, doesn't take his own pulse, and he's still interested.

Rose:  In what?

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  Rose, if you have to ask it does not matter anymore. 

[audience laughs]

Drew:  And that's interesting because it's not saying that Rose is dumb. It's saying that she's so proper that she is not even thinking about sex, that sex is not a big part of her life. Rose was known to have sex with a lot of different men over the course of the show.

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  Not as many—I think Blanche does have the most, but she's a very active, sexual woman, and I don't think they realized that about her at this point in the show—because I think there's an episode where she has sex with the first guy after her husband dies, right?

Glen:  Maybe. 

Drew:  I could be making that up. I could be confusing that with when she has the guy sleep over and then he dies in her bed.

Glen:  Another difference—maybe not difference, but something they leaned into with Rose's character is that she talks about her dead husband as if he's still alive.

Rose:  I used to sleep so well. I never even turned over. I'd wake up with a perfect hairdo. [laughs] Charlie on the other hand moves all night long. His side of the bed looks like a murder took place.

Dorothy:  Rose, Charlie is dead. 

Coco:  Why tell her?

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  Coco, it's fifteen years.

Rose:  I know he's dead. I'm not crazy. I just like to talk about him in the present tense sometimes. Makes him seem closer.

Coco:  That's fine Rose. You do that. I don't mind at all.

Dorothy:  Sure, Rose. Set a place at the table.

[audience laughs]

Glen:  And that's supposed to be like a character quirk of hers. Although she views Charlie very fondly throughout the series, I don't think she necessarily held on to his ghost as tightly as she does in this episode. 

Drew:  Yeah. They definitely moved away from that, I think, because it makes her seem sad.

Glen:  But it's something that Coco was actually very protective of.

Drew:  Yeah. One of the few character moments we get for Coco, he is protective of her, which is nice. So at the end of this conversation at the table, Blanche reveals that Harry has actually proposed and she's giving him her answer tonight, which is the drama of the episode—which is kind of needless, but whatever. This is very distressing for Dorothy and Blanche because they're worried that they're going to get kicked out. So Blanche goes off to go do her thing, and this is when Rose is like, "What do we have for collateral? A gay cook?" You're right—gay cook. They don't say "houseboy." "Houseboy" is my weird term.

Glen:  That's what people probably think I am for you.

Drew:  Why don't you live in the house then, Glen?

Glen:  Because Thurman won't let me. 

Drew:  That's true. If you're the houseboy here, you don't do nearly enough yard work.

Glen:  I don't do any yard work. 

Drew:  I know. That's what I'm saying.

Glen:  Yeah. I think you'd get mad if I did. 

Drew:  I also don't know why Rose and Dorothy would have ownership of Coco, because very clearly Blanche is the one who's paying him—not anyone else. 

Glen:  I think they could all pay him. 

Drew:  I don't think—

Glen:  Blanche owns the house, but she's not that well off. She gets roommates because she needs the rent. And she's still working, at least in this episode. 

Drew:  Did they say what her job is in this? 

Glen:  Yeah. She works in a museum. So I'm guessing she's some sort of paid docent. 

Drew:  She's that the entire show. She always works in an art museum. I think she does—her job figures onto the show the least—only when it's convenient. It's also interesting that Rose says very bluntly that they have a gay cook because it's only a few episodes later when they have Dorothy's friend who's a lesbian visit. At that point, Rose doesn't seem to have the vocabulary to talk about gay people. She was very shy about saying those things.

Glen:  Yeah. I was shocked that she was the one to point it out, and I expected the show to have it be a character quirk— like everyone else in the house knows that Coco's gay and that Rose just refers to him as a bachelor. I thought that would have been the easiest comedy mining they could have done. I was glad that they didn't, that from the get-go all the characters just know he's gay.

Drew:  Even dumb Rose. 

Glen:  We've been talking for a while, but I wanted to point [out] that when Rose says, "All we have is a gay cook," that's less than five minutes into the episode. Less than five minutes into the episode, we've met the gay character; he's been called gay—

Drew:  Outed. 

Glen:  Yes. So yeah, he's very front and center in this pilot.

Drew:  And it didn't really drive people off because people were just as excited about the second episode as they were about the first, and it was a hit right from the get-go, and middle America wasn't put off by the idea that there might have been a gay character. They might have been relieved when he didn't ever show up again. 

Glen:  When he was lost at sea?

Drew:  Speaking of lost at sea, Glen— 

Glen:  Time for a break?

Drew:  Yeah. Take a commercial at sea. 

Glen:  [Glen imitates a foghorn].

Drew:  [laughs] What is that?

Glen:  I don't know.

Drew:  [laughs]

["Thank You for Being a Friend," performed by Cindy Fee]

[Gayest Episode Ever promotes A Love Bizarre]

[and old television promotional spot for Small Wonder plays]

[Gayest Episode Ever promotes their Patreon] 

["Thank You for Being a Friend" performed by Cindy Fee]

Drew:  Hey, Glen.

Glen:  Yeah?

Drew:  We're back. 

Glen:  So creepy. I'm leaving. 

Drew:  You like being back, don't you? 

Glen:  Do not ASMR me on this podcast. 

Drew:  No, that's not—

Glen:  You're going to get a bunch of listeners you don't want.

Drew:  I don't understand ASMR. I wasn't trying to be ASMR. I was trying to be creepy. That was what I was trying to do.

Glen:  I mean, I can draw you that Venn diagram. 

Drew:  We're back, and there is a knock at the door—on the show, not in real life—and you think, "Oh, it's Harry coming to pick up Blanche for a date." No. It's Sophia—looking slightly off.

Sophia:  Hi, there. 

Dorothy:  Ma! Ma, what's the matter? 

Sophia:  Everyone is fine. No one died. The home burned down.

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  My god, are you alright? How'd you get here?

Sophia:  I hitched.

Dorothy:  Oh, Ma!

Sophia:  A cab. I took a cab. 

Dorothy:  Well, you should have called.

Sophia:  I'm perfectly capable of managing by myself. I don't need help. I'm a totally independent person.

Dorothy:  I know. I know. 

Sophia:  I need $67 for the cab. 

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  Sixty-seven dollars! Ma. Ma, this is crazy. The home is 15 minutes from here.

Sophia:  My cab driver is cute, but he said there was an additional tax for a bilingual driver. 

[audience laughs]

Glen:  She's not as cute old person. They went more realistic with her old lady makeup, and she doesn't wear—her glasses are different. Her hair is a little sadder.

Drew:  Yeah. It's a little round sphere of hair, and now it's just kind of bigger.

Glen:  Yeah. And there's just—her eyes are more responsive and piercing, and we talked about this in the last episode of Golden Girls. We covered how the original conceit of Sophia is that she had a stroke and can say whatever she wants. They're very explicit about that here. They killed the part of her brain that silences those sort of thoughts in her head.

Drew:  It's very expositiony, and in what is otherwise a fairly well written pilot, it's the only part where I feel like you're just giving us information. You can't do this anymore artfully, I guess.

Blanche:  Oh, Sophia, honey! How nice to see you. 

Sophia:  Who are you?

[audience laughs]

Blanche:  It's me, Blanche.

Sophia:  You look like a prostitute. 

[audience laughs]

Rose:  Sophia, the things you say! She didn't mean that Blanche. 

Sophia:  Of course I mean it. Look at her. My cab driver would fall in love. Can I get something to eat, or is the fancy man in the kitchen? 

[audience laughs]

Rose:  Oh! The way she talks. 

Blanche:  [laughs] She can't help it. 

Rose:  Oh, I've known plenty of women who've had strokes. Some of them were in very bad shape, but they're still ladies. 

Blanche:  But Rose, this stroke destroyed the part of her brain that censors what she says, so she just says whatever she thinks. She can't help it.

Sophia:  He's an okay petunia.

Drew:  I don't' know if that's quite literally a thing. It's like, "She had a stroke and [lost] the ability to censor out mean comments. Now she just says anything. That's just Sophia. Imagine all the crazy things she's going to say over the course of the show," which she does. But later in the show she says it with a smirk, and she's kind of mischievous and having fun. Here, it's a little more—she doesn't seem like she's having fun as she's saying it, which I guess is probably how they wrote it initially. They were like, "No. No. We need to make you less—" It comes off a little harsh sometimes.

Glen:  Yeah. She says that Blanche looks like a prostitute, and she calls Coco the "fancy man." 

Drew:  Which is not the—and a petunia later. 

Glen:  Yeah. He's an okay petunia. 

Drew:  [laughs] So this is maybe something that they touched up or did differently because they had to work in the fact that Shady Pines burned down now and that she's going to be there all the time, even though it doesn't really explain the living arrangements at this point. 

Glen:  Coco lives in this house, too. How many bedrooms are there? And I think Blanche's bedroom is in a different spot than it usually is.

Drew:  Yeah. It must be. They did some magic on this after the fact. But Coco's not in this scene. You just see Sophia leaving and coming back and describing him as being a "fancy man" and a "petunia" and that she's okay with him because he gave her a square of food. I can't figure out—

Glen:  It's matzah. 

Drew:  Oh. Is that what it is? Okay.

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  I thought it was like—is it a square of cheese or something? Okay. I didn't grow up on matzah. I'm sorry. 

Glen:  [laughs] Well, neither did I.

Drew:  Oh. I didn't know it came in squares that size. 

Glen:  Yeah. They're very big. 

Drew:  You just made hands a lot bigger than what she's eating. How big are they? 

Glen:  No, hers was pretty big too. 

Drew:  Maybe it's just the scale because she's so small. It's hard to tell. 

Glen:  I guess our podcast listeners can't see my hand gestures.

Drew:  Podcast listeners, how big can matzah be? Please tell us. Tweet at Glen. Then there's another knock at the door, and it is Harry. Do you recognize him at all?

Glen:  Yes. From what? I don't know. But he's around in my brain.

Drew:  The only thing I knew him as being from is something that I know you know about. He was the star of a little show called Danger Island.

Glen:  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Drew:  Yeah. And then he was married to Lee Meriwether, a.k.a. Catwoman Number Three.

Glen:  She was number three?

Drew:  Yeah. I think Julie Newmar was first, Eartha Kitt was second, and then Lee Meriwether was just in the movie. 

Glen:  Yeah. Yeah.

Drew:  They were married. And we see him for literally a second, and you're like, "Okay. He's going to come—" No. He does not come back later. That's all we really see of him. But Harry is a schmoozy guy, and he has gotten Blanche's attention really, really well. And he—

Glen:  Are we really going to talk about Lee Meriwether as Catwoman and not in Munsters Return? 

Drew:  I never watched Munsters Return. That was not a big part of my childhood. I didn't—that was syndicated, right? 

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  I don't think that was syndicated, except—I remember watching it at my grandma's house a few times. Remember 1313 Mockingbird Lane?

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  Yeah. That was really good. Portia de Rossi is a good Lily Munster, it turns out. 

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  Yeah. I wish that'd been a TV show. I think you can watch the entire pilot right now. Look it up online. Brian Fuller directed a kind of not jokey—

Glen:  I think it was just called Mockingbird Lane.

Drew:  That's probably a better name—and Jerry O'Connell is Herman and—who's the dad?

Glen:  Oh! Eddie Izzard. 

Drew:  Eddie Izzard is Grandpa Munster. It was really good. Yeah. 

Glen:  [laughs]

Drew:  Whatever. Is there anything about Harry's interaction with the girls that you feel like talking about? I'm trying to think. 

Glen:  I mean, Sophia calls him out as a scumbag. 

[audience laughs] 

Blanche:  Goodnight.

Harry:  Goodnight. Thanks, ladies. It was a pleasure.

Dorothy:  Nice meeting you, Harry. Have fun. 

Sophia:  The man is a scuzzball. 

[audience laughs uproariously and one audience member cackles]

Drew:  I don't know at what point this was changed, but at some point the network said you can't air—what they originally wanted to say was "He's a douchebag." I feel like the laugh she gets for, "He's a scuzzball," is big big, and I'm like, "Scuzzball's not that funny." I think that that might—

Glen:  That explains Dorothy's reaction, because Dorothy is like—

Drew:  She's like, "Oh, my gosh."

Glen:  —so shocked, like, she throws up her hands. And yeah, that was one of the biggest laugh lines of the whole episode. 

Drew:  So I think for the studio audience before they even knew this was going to air on TV, they might have said "douchebag," and they might have switched it out with "scuzzball" after the fact but kept the original laugh because it was a really good laugh. 

Glen:  Yeah. Dorothy's reaction is very big and genuine. But that also changes Sophia's character for me because when she says "scuzzball"—spoiler alert: Blanche doesn't marry Harry. He turns out to be not a great guy and I read that as Sophia having intuition beyond what the other women have. If she calls him a douchebag, that's very surface level. Like, he just looks kind of stuffy. 

Drew:  Now I'm thinking about what the connotations of douchebag are. So a douchebag can be a pompous person, or it could just be an untrustworthy guy? No.

Glen:  No. "Untrustworthy" is not really—

Drew:  He's not good enough for you, I guess. I don't know. I actually don't know what people mean when they call someone a douchebag. Obnoxious—

Glen:  Let's ask our female listeners.

Drew:  Female listeners, who's a douchebag and why? Tell us. Tweet at Glen. She is perceptive, though. I mean, she's not wrong, as we find out. So the next scene they're out on the lanai, finally, and Coco is there to silently give them cups of tea, I guess. He does not say anything, and it's weird that he's just serving them in his bathrobe as they wait up late for Blanche to come back from her date and reveal if she's marrying Harry or not. So when she does, there's this big, protracted scene where they talk about shellfish for an extended amount of time. 

Blanche:  Well, hi.

Rose:  What happened? 

Blanche:  Oh, we had the nicest time. We went to Joe's. You ever been to Joe's?

Rose:  Yes! What happened? 

Blanche:  I had the stone crabs. I've never had stone crabs. You ever had stone crabs?

Dorothy:  Yes. Yes, Blanche. Just tell us. 

Blanche:  Oh. Well, I was just so relieved they didn't have eyes. You know I can't eat anything with eyes—like lobster.

Rose:  I can't eat anything that moves.

Dorothy:  Like what, Rose? Horses?

[audience laughs]

Rose:  Like oysters.

Coco:  Oysters don't move.

Dorothy:  Coco, they could dance! Who cares? 

[audience laughs] 

Dorothy:  Tell us.

Rose:  Oysters move very slowly. You have to watch very closely. 

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  Blanche, are you going to marry Harry?

Blanche:  Marry Harry. Marry Harry. A little rhyme.

Dorothy:  Knock it off. Are you? 

[audience laughs]

Blanche:  Yes. Next week. 

Drew:  That whole exchange—do you think Blanche is purposely delaying?

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  Okay. I thought she was just maybe being a dingbat.

Glen:  No. I think she's purposely delaying.

Drew:  Because she doesn't want to tell them, or she's building up drama?

Glen:  She doesn't want to tell them. 

Drew:  Okay.

Glen:  She feels bad about kicking them out of her house.

Drew:  Right.

Glen:  And then says like, "Oh. Well, you can live here until you find a place."

Drew:  Which is still not great. 

Glen:  I mean, Rose is also pretty selfish in this episode, being so focused on what Blanche getting married would mean for her housing situation and saying it in front of Blanche in a very kind of rude way. Like, whether Blanche is making a great decision or not, on the surface you accept your friend's happiness and don't qualify their happiness by how it affects you.

Drew:  Yeah. I guess she does have—the argument against marrying Harry is legitimate because maybe don't marry someone you don't know very well. But that is all undercut by the fact that she has something to lose, and she's already said so, so why would Blanche listen to her?

Glen:  Right.

Drew:  The scene actually—the scene actually ends with Blanche saying, "Yes, we're getting married in a week," and then it goes to commercial. And you see Dorothy, Rose, and Coco with shocked expressions, and Coco particularly has a really big, shocked expression, then it fades out. It comes back from commercial, and Blanche still sitting in the seat, and Dorothy and Rose are standing in the same places, and Coco is just gone. He is not there anymore, and it's very odd, like "Wait. Where the fuck did he go?"

Glen:  Where's Coco?

Drew:  He was already blinking out of existence at this point.

Glen:  I love his robe, though. 

Drew:  I actually like the way he's dressed. And again, they didn't give him something that's super effeminate. They just gave him a nice man's robe. 

Glen:  Yeah. It's nice. And he has a couple rings. He's a very well-appointed man.

Drew:  And later on, when you see him dressed for Blanche's wedding, he's wearing a very nice suit. He didn't dress up in drag or something ,which it wouldn't have been appropriate at that point in the show to have this character show up in drag all of a sudden. Rose and Dorothy do need a place to [live]. How do you feel about the blowgun wedding joke?

Rose:  Charlie and I waited two whole years before we got married. 

Dorothy:  I got married before my father finished the sentence. 

Rose:  You married your father?

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  My father told Stan that he had to marry me. I was pregnant. 

Rose:  You had a blowgun wedding? 

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  If you live in the Amazon. In Queens it's called "shotgun." 

[audience laughs]

Drew:  That's bad-dumb Rose. There's also a discussion about how at this point in the show Stan has—I don't think they even mention Stan by name. But Dorothy's ex-husband left her for a stewardess, which they do keep, but it's interesting that very quickly in the show Stan marries that woman. And then they divorce again because, I think, the writers realize that it's a lot more interesting to have him be single and still involved in Dorothy's life than living off in Hawaii and not being a character. But it is weird that Dorothy doesn't move to Florida until after she divorces Stan, and then Stan also follows her to Florida and is hanging around all the time.

Glen:  And also, just an old person who moved to Florida because he's old—maybe.

Drew:  Maybe that's it.

Glen:  The writers rightly figured out that if two of our characters have dead husbands and one has a living ex-husband, maybe it would be interesting to have as  a character. 

Drew:  Does Stan sleep with Blanche? Am I making that up in my head?

Glen:  No. He sleeps with Dorothy. 

Drew:  Okay. So there's never an episode where he sleeps with any of the other women?

Glen:  I don't believe so.

Drew:  Okay. I could have just dreamed that [laughs]. I don't know why I would dream—

Glen:  I don't think Blanche would sleep with Stan—although there is a very poor joke. Actually, I think this comes up later. Rose is talking about how Blanche needs a man and even asked someone out at her husband's funeral. I would have cut that detail out. 

Drew:  Yeah. And that doesn't become part of Blanche's character. She was very devastated when her husband died, and I think at some point it says it took her a while to eventually date again—I think. My Golden Girls history is not great today, I guess.

Glen:  It's because your dog looks so cute napping right now. You're distracted. 

Drew:  He is fun to look at. At some point I had a much more encyclopedic knowledge of Golden Girls. Sophia comes out, and Sophia thought that there was burglars, so she hid all her jewels. "You don't have any jewels. [inaudible 00:48:10]. I can't find them." Coco comes in, and he's like, "Can I get you some tea, Sophia?" And she's like, "How about a shot of gin with a beer chaser?" And I think they cut out another line there. I think he had a snappy response, and I think the fade out is on him with his mouth opening because they're like, "Nope. We're going to take that away from you."

Glen:  But this is a scene that has both of them, which you said does not exist.

Drew:  That's right. This is the only time they get to be in the same scene together, I think—because Sophia's not at the wedding at all, right?

Glen:  No.

Drew:  Which is weird. Sophia should be at the wedding, which we're going to get to right now. But the very next scene is—I guess it's a week later, and the girls are all dressed for the wedding, which is going to happen in the house because on sitcoms weddings always happen in the house. It's a lot easier to do.

Glen:  But Blanche goes into a lot of explanation about why. It's because she has to pee so much when she drinks anything, and she doesn't like public restrooms. So, therefore, she should have her wedding in her house—but invites no guests.

Drew:  No. She surely has friends outside of these women that she's kicking out of her house, right, and does not, apparently, invite Sophia, which is weird—and they're color coded. Dorothy is wearing a beautiful mauve blazer that is as long as an academic gown. And Blanche is wearing yellow?

Glen:  Mm-hmm. Because of pee.

Drew:  [laughs] And Rose is wearing blue because she's sad. But it's a very nice moment, the three of them lined up, and they're color coded. It looks very, very nice.

Glen:  For me, I like pointing out that this episode pretty much has most of—well, has all of the images in scenes from the opening—the iconic ones.

Drew:  Yeah. The three of them sitting on the bed together. 

Glen:  The scene where they're sitting on the bed, the three of them sitting on the lanai together.

Drew:  Dorothy putting her arm around Blanche around Rose's mouth. I'm like, "Oh. That's why she was doing it," because Rose is about to say she has a—

Glen:  Bad feeling about Harry.

Drew:  She has a bad feeling. Yeah. She thinks that he's untrustworthy, and Dorothy's like, "You cannot tell her,"which is correct, though there's a weird joke about—Rose does not have psychic powers elsewhere in the series. But she has this weird line about—

Rose:  And I have to tell Blanche.

Dorothy:  Tell Blanche what?

Rose:  That she can't marry him.

Dorothy:  The wedding is in 12 minutes. You can't tell her that.

Rose:  I owe it to her. I'm her friend.

Dorothy:  But there's nothing to tell her. This is just some crazy hunch.

Rose:  My hunches are never wrong. Mrs. Gandhi would be alive today if she had taken my call.

[audience laughs]

Drew:  I did not remember that Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards. It happened about a year before this episode aired—that fell down a weird Wikipedia hole. But also, I would not have expected that on two episodes of our gay sitcom podcast we'd mention Indira Gandhi, and now we have. She "ran a real big country, which is hard to do even if you're a guy." I think my new favorite line about that part is, "Amelia—" [laughs].

Glen:  [over Drew's laughter] For people who don't know what Drew is talking about, we're talking about Family Guy's rendition of the Maude theme song. 

Singer:  [to the tune of the "Maude" theme song] Lady Godiva was a freedom rider, she didn't care if the whole world looked. Joan of Arc with the Lord to guide her, she was a sister who really cooked. Madame Curie was a strong woman character, workin' all day in a science lab, yeah. Clara Barton was a famous nurse, who was rapping with the soldiers and bandages, too. Susan B. Anthony, always out doin' stuff, marching around and holding up signs.

Peter:  And then there's Maude.

Singer:  Pocahontas had it all going on—

Peter:  What the hell?

Singer:  —an Indian guide with lots of Indian pride. Indira Gandhi ran a whole big country—that isn't easy, even if you're a guy.

Peter:  And then there's Maude.

Singer:  Babe Zaharias was a really good athlete—

Peter:  Aw, come on!

Singer:  —good at track and field and professional golf, too.

Peter:  And then there's Maude!

Singer:  Amelia Earhart flew a lot of airplanes, except for that one time when she didn't come back. Cleopatra lived way out in the desert—

Peter:  And then there's Maude! Come on!

Singer:  —but still found a way to keep herself looking fine. And then there's Maude.

Peter:  Ahh! Ahh! There we go! That was an ordeal.

Drew:  "Amelia Earhart flew a lot of airplanes, except for that one time when she didn't come back—" [laughs and laughs, and laughs some more].

Glen:  It's clearly the best Family Guy joke.

Drew:  Oh, Family Guy. So Indira Gandhi was assassinated. That's sad. Another thing that happens is finally Blanche heads out. She is done peeing constantly and [is] over her jitters about this wedding. And in order to keep her from telling Blanche about her bad premonition, Dorothy literally shoves Rose in a closet, and then Coco is the one who comes to take her out—and I am positive that that would be a place where he would make a joke about being in the closet or something, and we don't see it. 

Glen:  No.

Drew:  But he shouldn't be there. There's no other reason for him to come into the room, really, except to say that the minister is there.

Glen:  Dorothy's physical comedy in this scene shows her level of comfort with Betty White, I think, even if they kind of hated each other. 

Drew:  I wonder if they even knew that at this point.

Glen:  I don't know, but I just think that it's worth hammering home again that Bea Arthur is very comfortable in this role already, like [when] she just grabs that ring off of Blanche's nightstand and throws it for Rose to chase, when she throws her in the closet, when she very physically grasps her from behind and puts a hand over Rose's mouth—she is not phoning this in. 

Drew:  And I'm trying to think—I've been watching a lot of Maude lately, and she doesn't do physical humor like that there. Maybe it was because of the fact that she had a certain level of animosity towards Betty White that she felt happier to do it. I don't know. I was thinking about that animosity, though. If you don't know, they weren't close. They didn't hate each other; they just weren't close. Betty is the one who said it, and she said it in a nice, Betty White way, so I think it's probably fine. That would have been a weird dynamic, I think. But you also have two major stars—everyone liked Rue, but you have two major stars who were trying to flex their muscles.

Glen:  Do you know what could help that relationship? 

Drew:  Coco?

Glen:  Yeah. I was going to say Coco. 

Drew:  Coco could have real-talked them all into being friends? 

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  Yeah. In the living room everyone's waiting for Harry. The minister is annoyed because he has a lot of funerals because he's in Florida [laughs]. That's another Florida joke that I think they got tired of making eventually, but apparently people are dropping dead left and right in Florida.

Glen:  That's true.

Drew:  Is it true? 

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  Oh.

Blanche:  He's a half hour late.

Coco:  He probably got caught in traffic. 

Minister:  Ladies, I'm on a tight schedule. This is Miami. I've got funerals backed up. 

[audience laughs]

Coco:  Give us a few minutes, please. 

Minister:  Five minutes more—then I've got to bury Mr. Pincus. 

Drew:  There's a knock at the door and it's a police officer. Did you recognize him?

Glen:  Yes?

Drew:  It's Meshach Taylor from Designing Women, which means that he was on set with his future costar of Mannequin, Estelle Getty—but they don't have any scenes together.

Glen:  No.

Drew:  But I think that gives me motivation—I was trying to think what song I want to close this out with. I think I'm just going to make it the song from Mannequin because nothing else is making sense to me—and also, I like Mannequin—and also, Mannequin has come up a lot more often on this podcast than I would have expected.

Glen:  That might have been me forcing you mentally to talk about Mannequin.

Drew:  Possibly. I like talking about Mannequin though. The news is that Harry is not coming to the wedding. He has been arrested. He's a bigamist. He as wives in six other cities—which made me think, "Isn't that polygamist? Because "bi" is two and poly is multiple? No, apparently not. Connotationally "bigamy" is the word used to describe the crime of illegally marrying someone when you know you're married to someone else; "polygamy" is the practice of having multiple spouses but generally isn't used in the sense of committing a crime. Good to know.

Glen:  I knew that because I wrote a movie about that—bigamy.

Drew:  Bigamy?

Glen:  Kind of. 

Drew:  Being Frank. Go see it in theaters quickly or soon on demand. Blanche is devastated.

Blanche:  My god, I just want to die.

Rose:  You're not a fool, Blanche. You're a beautiful, loving, trusting woman. There's no fool here, Blanche.

Blanche:  I guess maybe I'm hoping the shock will be too much for my heart and I'll just drop dead right here. The minister can bury me with Mr. Pincus. 

[audience laughs] 

Blanche:  I won't have to look anyone in the eye ever again.

Rose:  Except maybe Mr. Pincus. 

[audience laughs]

Drew:  And then Rose's response of "Except for Mr. Pinkus" is my favorite line of the episode because I think that is perfect Rose: That is not the right comment, that is very dumb, [it's] not wrong—and then Dorothy punches her [laughs], enough that Rose's reacts. She's like, "Ow." And then we end on the lanai where it's been three weeks, which is kind of a random amount of time. But apparently, Blanche has not left her room in three weeks, which seems unreasonable—hasn't gone to work. And they talk about how different cultures grieve.

Dorothy:  Golf. The movies. Theater tickets. She wouldn't even budge for Julio Iglesias.

Rose:  I know grief. It takes time. 

Dorothy:  Oh. Please, Rose. Listen. If you're Irish, you have a wake—you eat, you cry, you drink, you vomit, and you're done. 

[audience laughs] 

Dorothy:  If you're Jewish you cry, you sit, you eat for seven days, you put on ten pounds, and it's over.

[audience laughs] 

Dorothy:  We Italians scream, dress up a donkey, hire a band, and that's that. 

[audience laughs] 

Dorothy:  It's these Southern Protestants who make it a way of life. 

[audience laughs]

Drew:  And I like that. That's all good. I like Sophia's response.

Sophia:  When I go, put me in a steal sack and leave me on the curb next to the cans. 

[audience laughs]

Dorothy:  We thought you were asleep.

Sophia:  You never know.

[audience laughs]

Drew:  And that's the first point we get fun Sophia.

Glen:  Right.

Drew:  Where she's like—

Glen:  Sly.

Drew:  Yes. She's being sneaky, and I think that's when they understand her. And then she comes out. Blanche emerges, and she's perfectly fine. She's not sad anymore. And she gets at what is the heart of the series. It took us a while to get here, but she expresses the idea that—

Blanche:  I just thought I'd never feel good again.

Sophia:  How long is this story? I'm 80. I have to plan. 

[audience laughs]

Blanche:  Then this morning I woke up, and I was in the shower shampooing my hair, and I heard humming. Well, I thought there was someone in there with me. No. It was me. I was humming, and humming means I'm feeling good. And then I realized I was feeling good because of you. You made the difference. You're my family, and you make me happy to be alive.

Drew:  She thought she needed a man to have a family, and she didn't want to be alone anymore. However, she's not alone because "I have you girls, and you are my family now."

Glen:  Mm-hmm. I thought it was funny that Dorothy promises to all stick together even if they get married.

Drew:  Yeah.

Rose:  Let's all drive to Coconut Grove for lunch. 

Blanche:  Okay.

Rose:  My treat. We have to celebrate.

Sophia:  What? That she came out of her room?

[audience laughs]

Rose:  That we're together. 

Dorothy:  And that no matter what happens—even if we all get married—we'll stick together.

Drew:  And then she—she marries Les—

Glen:  And that is not how the series ends, Dorothy.

Drew:  She marries Leslie Nielsen and peaces the fuck out, and they're left behind.

Glen:  Dorothy. You're a fucking liar, Dorothy. 

Drew:  Makes the girls have to start a bed and breakfast. Yeah. Terrible idea. 

Glen:  Dorothy.

Drew:  That is weird that they ended the show precisely in the way Dorothy said it would never happen.

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  They go to lunch to celebrate Blanche not grieving anymore, and Sophia's like, "Nope. The fancy man and I are going to the dog track." But then it ends on a really dumb joke.

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Sophia:  I've got a date tonight.

Dorothy:  Oh, with whom? 

Sophia:  The fancy man and I are going to the dog track.

[audience laughs]

Blanche:  Your mother bets?

Dorothy:  No. She rides. She's a dog jockey. Let's go. 

[audience laughs]

Drew:  "No, she's a dog jockey!" Credits [laughs]. It's like this is the worst joke of the entire episode and that's how they end it.

Glen:  Yep. 

Drew:  And that's the first episode of Golden Girls. 

Glen:  And the last episode of Coco.

Drew:  Poor Coco. It's a really good pilot. I don't usually like pilots because they feel like weird pubescent versions of the thing I want to see an adult version of, and this actually is not terrible and—

Glen:  I forgot the thing I was going to say about Coco that I was saving for the end. That's okay. 

Drew:  I have some questions for you, though, I can ask about Coco. So I think it's a bummer that this show that ended up being a huge hit and was beloved by gay people anyway could have had a gay recurring character and didn't. I understand why it didn't. Is there a way this could have worked?

Glen:  No. It's called Golden Girls. The way it would have worked is if Sophia wasn't a character but then it would be a different show and you'd lose a lot of the heart in it. And there was something insular and nice about a show that all the main characters were women. A gay man is still a man.

Drew:  Could it have worked if Coco was over-the-top effeminate and he was just one of the girls? Would that be better or worse?

Glen:  No. That'd be worse. I like Coco as a character. He just didn't—there was no place for him here. Having a voice from a younger generation and also a man would have undercut what the show was and what it was trying to be—a show about four older women.

Drew:  Yes.

Glen:  And having a show about three or four older women and their younger, trendier, gay live-in cook just wouldn't have worked. And also, I think that is just a trope of sitcoms gone by. You don't really see the maid as a character. This isn't Brady Bunch. This isn't Maude. This isn't a bunch of other shows. This isn't Soap. They just don't—

Drew:  They're not supposed to be wealthy enough, really, to have live-in help. So that makes sense too. I guess—

Glen:  And also, they wanted a fresh-seeming show about older women.

Drew:  So ignoring the idea that it's called Golden Girls and a man being there ruins it, if it was a straight man who was living in the house and working for these women, would that have been potentially funnier because of—

Glen:  No. That would have just been—I wouldn't like that at all.

Drew:  Okay.

Glen:  Coco could have worked as a recurring character, like someone that one of the girls knew from work—or even if it was instead of Dr. Harry Weston as a neighbor.

Drew:  That would have made sense.

Glen:  Like, if their neighbor was a gay man/drag queen who sometimes came in in drag and was sometimes just there as a gay man talking about his life—I'm sure he and Blanche would have gotten along swimmingly. There is comedy to be mined from a recurring character, but not like—

Drew:  Maybe if he performed at The Rusty Anchor? It is interesting that the girls live in this house and we never get a sense of their neighborhood at all until the Westons move in. And I think even then the only other person we ever see visiting the show is Charley Dietz, who is just because of Empty Nest. But there are never any other recurring neighbors at all.

Glen:  Do you think it was foresight on the part of NBC to try and have a gay character on a show that ended up being so near and dear to the hearts of gay men?

Drew:  I don't, because I don't think the straight people who were responsible for creating the show realized that chosen family would be such a part of the gay community, and I think it was just a happy coincidence that what the girls are doing on the show ended up being a great metaphor for how a lot of queer communities build themselves. I could be wrong, but I feel like the people responsible for making the show were actually kind of out of touch with gay culture and wouldn't have been able to foresee that—and I say that because Stan Zimmerman, the guy I interviewed last season for this podcast, was a writer for this show. His writing partner was a writer for the show. Both worked on the show together. And they were both gay and weren't out, even though they were working on Golden Girls and you would think about it being one of the most welcoming places possible, but neither of them felt comfortable being out. I don't think it was until Marc Cherry joined the show that there is an out gay guy on the writing staff. I could be wrong about that. But it worked out.

Glen:  Okay.

Drew:  That is our discussion of Coco. I wish he'd been a thing. The entire time he's there, though, I feel like that Simpsons episode where Roy is living with them. You're just like—[laughs]. And Homer seems resentful that Roy even exists, and you're just like, "Come on, Roy."

Glen:  Yeah. He felt out of place every time he was on screen.

Drew:  Yeah. No fault of his own. Charles Levin—rest in peace. I'm going to put a link to a YouTube clip of him acting his face off on Hill Street Blues, which is a really good show and is an early '80s version of that crime detective show where everything kind of looks dirty and sweaty all the time—but in a really good way. Glen, you have a Twitter right? 

Glen:  Allegedly. We keep telling people to tweet at me. @IWriteWrongs—that is I-W-R-I-T-E-Wrongs with also a W. And my Instagram is @BrosQuartz—that is B-R-O-S-Quartz. Drew—that's it. Bye. 

Drew:  [laughs]

Glen:  No. Drew, where can people find you?

Drew:  I'm on Twitter @DrewGMackie—M-A-C-K-I-E. I'm on Instagram @KidIcarus222, like the video game and the numbers 222. My dog is on Instagram @Thurmaniac. He's more interesting than me. Look up Thurman on Instagram. He's quite the star. You can follow this podcast on Twitter @GayestEpisode. You can follow this podcast on Facebook @GayestEpisodeEver. If you ever look us up and we're not there, tell me, and I'll put us on there. Please give us a rate and review. I don't have one pulled for this episode. Please give us a rate and review. Those are helpful to get other people to listen to this podcast. We'll eventually read all the rates and reviews we get out loud and you can put words in our mouths like actors do with scriptwriters—scriptwriters do with actors. That's not how it works.

Glen:  Scriptwriters? Um—you know what I am.

Drew:  [laughs] You're a houseboy.

Glen:  Yeah. That's right. 

Drew:  Who doesn't do yard work. Discuss that.

Glen:  Because it's houseboy, not yard boy. 

Drew:  Oh, that's right. Okay. This is a TableCakes podcast. TableCakes is a Los Angeles based podcast network, and you can find out about all the other shows we're doing at TableCakes.com. We're still in our off season. We're coming back for Season 3 at some point, but until we get to season three we'll be doing random episodes every few weeks. So you'll hear from us again with an episode that will probably be about a cartoon show, which you'll enjoy. I swear, you'll enjoy it. Glen, people will enjoy it. 

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  Yeah. Podcast over.

Glen:  Bye forever.

["Nothing's Gonna' Stop Us Now" performed by Starship]

Katherine: A TableCakes production.